Vielmetter Los Angeles is honored to present our third solo exhibition with Hugo McCloud, “Tiempo”, opening on November 5, 2022.

“How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?”
-Christina Sharpe, In the Wake on Blackness and Being

Installation image credit: Jeff McLane

On May 5th, 2022, Netic Rebel was killed in a home invasion in the Yucatan region of Mexico. Hugo McCloud, Netic’s friend, his brother, whose own home occupied that same land, who was there and, by chance by luck, was able to escape, gathered himself, his mother, and a life built in fifteen minutes. The chaos and horror of this moment is in excess of these two sentences and remains the thing that words can only attend to and never fully capture. Tiempo, McCloud’s solo exhibition presented at Vielmetter, starts and ends here.

This moment changed every moment after, in this tragedy, in this thread of grief, loss, and absence. Tiempo reminds us that time is a finite thing, a precious spatial sensibility that makes itself known when it no longer exists within the bodies, places, and moments that make it matter. Time is here; time is flesh; time is breath assumed. When gone, when taken away, what is left? What are the marks of former presence? How does one hold and configure static images of a life that was just there?

The there presented in Tiempo that is no longer there is forged from photographs and videos from McCloud’s phone, taken over the last few years of his time in the Yucatan. These images—static and moving—have been shaped into various edited reels on McCloud’s social media and serve as the main source material for the works presented in the exhibition. The assembly of plastic-based portraits, abstracted sculptural wall works, and woodblock paintings build from McCloud’s interest and investment in ordinary materials, which exist in abundance in everyday applications of construction, commercial exchange, and laboring bodies. The plastic-based works serve as the figurative narrator depicting scenes ranging from the erection of his home and the community in which it was built to the last day he was there.

A wall being erected, palm trees being planted, someone passing by on a bike, emerge from brightly-hued plastic shaped to form these scenes and silhouettes. Netic also appears in a painting watering his plants, envisioned in the pink shorts he was last wearing. Pink, the particular neon-saturated shade of these shorts, appears as the color of sand in the hourglass sculpture. Turning and releasing particles of sand for fifteen minutes on a continuous loop, the sculpture collapses haptic memory and material history into a moment that turns as an eternity. McCloud’s woodblock embossed paintings are built atop recollections of escape (his mother, whom he hid during the home invasion, appears as a flat figure on a roof) and the photographs of every day. These works present porous abstractions, forming unwieldy partitions between affect and memory.

McCloud has spent just under twenty years traveling to Tulum Mexico and the Yucatan more broadly, beginning to build his home and studio in 2018, finishing in 2021and erecting the frame of the artist’s residency studios in 2022. McCloud’s hope and desire for this parcel of land, as a collective thing, as something for respite and creating, was in part shared with Rebel, who built in tandem with McCloud. The loss McCloud experienced in May of 2022 is of labor and vision, of family and spirit, of safety and home.

Tiempo is an exhibition of rememory. Rememory is to point toward the act of recollection and reassembly. That pulling from the recess of ones mind, to allow that to spill outward in order to not be forgotten but to live. For Morrison, who I look to concerning this term, rememory exists in the hold of terror and sorrow. In the shadows of very real and brutal places, circumstances, and peoples. It’s also entwined in glimmers of other things, in moments of pleasure, solitude, and reverie. Tiempo offers just that, beauty and despair as entangled reflection on a life lived, on a dream built, and the glimmer of its collapse.

Text by Essence Harden, a curator and writer based in Los Angeles.

McCloud (b. 1980, Palo Alto, CA) has had solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, The Arts Club, London and Fondazione 107, in Turin, Italy. He has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and The Drawing Center, New York. His work is in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of the Arts, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Brooklyn Museum, the Mott Warsh Collection, and The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection.